Hello agian, finally

Wow. We’ve been busy and it is now the beginning of December! Long time, no post.

We have seen some crazy stuff here in China: There was a doaist musical band at the airport made of both men and women wearing traditional, matching outfits and carrying all kinds of instruments (Chinese and Westerner by the looks of the cases). There was also a poodle sitting in the top part of the luggage trolley outside the airport. There is a “kind reminder” that dogs are not allowed inside, so it was being very polite and waiting outside. We’ve seen lots of cute children, the cutest of which was a kindergarten class from Hong Kong returning from a field trip to Shenzhen at the boarder crossing. They all had matching blue or pink sailor suits and little yellow backpacks and id holders around their necks. Since they were from HK, they spoke very good English. Finally, many products sold are packaged with a “free” item to entice you to buy them. Bread came with a single serving of jam. 7-up came with a reusable makeup bag. Liters of milk come with a single serving of other drinks. And today, a jar of jelly came with a rubric cube displaying the company logo and jam flavors. Weird.

We have eaten some weird stuff, but most of it is pretty tasty. Octopus didn’t agree with me and neither does the yogurt milk or sour milk, but we’re not sick of rice yet. Since we cook ourselves (because our school’s cafeteria food is no appetizing), we can make almost anything, with a little patience and luck. Banana pancakes in the wok turned out ok, as did a pumpkin pie in the new toaster oven. We have very limited cooking possibilities given limited space and utensils, but we’re making due.

We’ve been to some cool places in and around Shenzhen. Since we are so far out in the boonies, anywhere else seems cool. There is a really nice park in the city of town called Litchi Park. There is a lake there and Patrick has promised me we can rent one of the boats there sometime to paddle around in. You can feed the gigantic gold fish there or just sit under some trees. There are some really great restaurants in the downtown area too.

We have also been to Hong Kong two times thus far. We always seem to eat our way through the city and see some interesting sites. We went to an awesome exhibit on loan from the British Museum at the HK Museum of Art in October. We do shopping in HK, for prescription drugs, shoes and books in English. We found a restaurant that was offering a Ruben sandwich for about 26 USD. Many things there are out of our price range, but there’s plenty to look at, for sure.

We have been teaching and next week will be our 13th lesson. We have a lot of students, and we’re just now learning their names. Over 500 each and we only see them once a week. We know the really bad ones and the really good ones. Most of them have “English” names, some of which are real English names (Mary, Sam, Tom etc.) some are from Japanese comics (Mikato) and some are just weird (Pizza, Harry Potter, Michael Jackson). Most of our classes are really good. There are 40-55 kids in most classes, which is the hard part. Even the bad ones are much better behaved than American students, but having twice as many people in the class at once is difficult.

We teach about 13 classes a week, which are 45 minutes long. The actual “working” part doesn’t take that much time. We only plan one lesson a week, which usually needs some small revisions after the first few classes. We have been doing an English Corner one bevening a week which is supposed to be a time for students to come and chat. One of the Chinese English teachers got the wrong idea at the beginning of term. He thought we were teaching an extra class and required all his students to come. Luckily we’ve been able to give him the brush off. Anyway, we also hang out in our office sometimes and answer students’ and teachers’ questions. The teachers give these city wide English tests that are made by a Chinese person somewhere. They have weird fill in the blanks because which have more than one answer, but the answer keys are very specific.
Would you give me a _____ in your boat? The answer is “ride” but you could also say “lift.”

The hard part about living here is getting all the daily stuff. Everything takes a long time to do. We are really far away from the downtown part of the city. Our school is one of the most isolated in the city. There is a Chinese grocery store that is 15-20 minutes away that has great veggies and fruit, household supplies and such. This kind of store doesn’t carry fresh milk or sandwich bread though. There is a Wal-mart in our district, in the downtown area, and a Carrefour, which is French chain. They are about 30 minute away directly when we can catch the school bus after school or maybe 45 on the public bus. We take Chinese lessons twice a week in Lou Ho, one of the central districts of Shenzhen. It is nice to have a free ride down there, which takes about 50 minutes when the school takes us. There are a lot of great restaurants in the area and good shopping.

After school we sometimes go shopping or hang out and watch DVDs. We’ve made some friends who work at the private school behind ours, Isaac and Rain. They like playing card games and cooking. We miss all our friends and family at home. We hope you guys continue to keep in touch, especially with the holidays now in full swing.